Investor relations activities

Maintaining an active, broad and ongoing dialogue with investors and analysts is a top priority in our investor relations activities. Our declared objective is to provide a continuous and sustained flow of information about the LANXESS Group. Roadshows, conferences and the LANXESS Capital Markets Day 2012 were among the main activities for communicating with our IR target groups in 2012. Altogether, we again hosted more than 70 days of roadshows and capital market conferences, thus continuing our comprehensive investor relations activities in these areas. The Chairman of the Board of Management and the Chief Financial Officer participated in most of the roadshows and conferences, but others were carried out by the Investor Relations team. Our activities in 2012 continued to focus on our stockholders. However, we also expanded our dialogue with fixed income investors and with investors who are focused on sustainability.

In-depth exchanges at roadshows

Last year, too, we continued to use our roadshows to engage in a broad and personal dialogue with institutional investors. Not only did LANXESS management and the Investor Relations team maintain the high frequency of roadshows in international capital market centers like Boston, New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt and Zurich, they also stepped up the dialogue in other regions where there is an interest in our shares. In Europe, this included the Benelux and Scandinavian countries as well as Eastern Europe. Asia was also a focus, and we held roadshows in Singapore and Hong Kong. In North America, we sought contact with investors in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto in addition to the U.S. cities already mentioned.

We additionally gave investors the opportunity to gain a detailed insight into our company at individual LANXESS sites with, for example, plant tours. Participating locations included our company headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany, our site in Shanghai, China, and our production facility in Orange, United States.

New growth targets announced at LANXESS Media and Capital Markets Day

Reporting on our new corporate targets was the focus of the LANXESS Media Day and LANXESS Capital Markets Day events that we hosted in New York on September 19 and 20. Another focal point, apart from the company’s medium-term alignment, was our Performance Polymers segment, whose business units boast a product portfolio that allows them to participate in the key global mobility megatrend. Accordingly, the heads of our Butyl Rubber, Performance Butadiene Rubbers and High Performance Materials business units explained, for example, how LANXESS products will individually contribute to our growth, today and in the future.

The presentations from the LANXESS Capital Markets Day are available in the “Investor Relations” section of our website.

Strong presence at conferences

In 2012, LANXESS again participated in many global conferences as an important means of communicating with analysts and investors. In addition to conferences held in global financial centers like Frankfurt, London and New York, the LANXESS Board of Management and the Investor Relations team used events in Singapore and Tokyo as a platform for providing information about LANXESS’s performance and growth strategy to audiences in the Asia region. We also participated in special forums for private investors in order to present the company’s alignment to this important target group. In 2013, we intend to again show a strong presence at international conferences. One of our goals in this regard is to strategically expand our dialogue with institutional investors in Asia. We also aim to increase our participation at events for private investors.

Further IR activities support exchange of information

Conference calls remain another important means of providing capital market participants with timely and extensive information updates. In these calls, LANXESS’s Board of Management explains our published results or reports on current strategic measures like major growth initiatives. Conference calls are streamed live in the “Investor Relations” section of the LANXESS website, and recorded versions are available for download for one year.

The “Investor Relations” section of our website also contains the presentations from roadshows and conferences, financial reports, publications like the LANXESS Fact Book, investor news and details about our shares and bonds. In addition, there is a contact form for ordering copies of our financial reports, for example.

LANXESS earns top ratings for its capital market communications

Maintaining a broad, timely and transparent dialogue with the capital markets has always been a priority for us. That is why we are very pleased that LANXESS’s capital market communications have been recognized by portfolio managers and analysts in prestigious rankings and that last year it once again received many awards. The credibility and transparency of communications, the focus on target groups and access to top management were again important criteria for the capital market participants polled in 2012.

Our investor relations activities received several first-place honors from the U.K.’s respected IR Magazine, for example. Chairman of the Board of Management, Dr. Axel C. Heitmann, was honored for best investor relations by a CEO in Europe, while our IR team ranked top for investor relations work by a mid-cap company. The awards were based on a survey of some 500 European portfolio managers and analysts.

For the first time, LANXESS also took top honors from the buy side of the European chemical sector in the annual survey of investors conducted by U.S. magazine Institutional Investor. In the previous year, the sell-side analysts had ranked LANXESS's IR team first among European chemical companies. Here we took second place in 2012. In compiling its rankings, Institutional Investor asked more than 800 fund managers, some 400 brokerages and nearly 1,500 analysts to rate the investor relations work of European companies.